[laglad]

I speak as an African (Nigerian).

As humans, we plan into the future. However, our planning timeframes are limited by how far into the future we can imagine. Further, our ability to imagine the future depends on how likely we believe that future to be.

In the West where life is safe and prosperous, planning/imagining 20-30 years out is reasonable. In all likelihood, you will live that long. However, in war-torn African countries, the planning timeframe is much shorter for the people. If one faction can gain an advantage that gives them dominance over another faction for the next 2 years, they'll view that as ok. They do so because they can't actually think further than that. The past has taught them not to. This leads to awful decisions in a 10-yr frame. And so they stay trapped in a shitty situation.

I think the actionable question here is "How can an (x+n) year future be imagined?" where x is the current imagined future whether it be a day, month or year and n is any additional time.

Sadly, this question is philosophical until the basic needs of survival are met.

[GuyCall]

This is a great observation about how critically important the expectation of long-term safety is. Take a rich developed country and reduce that expectation from decades down to years and watch the economy collapse. Those guarantees of safety allow a huge amount of wealth to be created. People can invest huge amounts of capital into projects with very long and beneficial payoffs

[Ras_]

This was also an underlying factor when I tried to find why Russian tourists used to spend crazy amounts of money right across the EU border. Few of them told that looking back, it's possible that things might not last, so you mind as well use what you have now. When your planning perspective isn't long, you make different choices.

[r00fus]

What is criminal is that the so-called humanitarian "West" either does nothing to assist longer-term thinking (don't want to create self-sufficient competitors!). Instead we strip-mine, exploit and install puppet governments so our all-important corporations and their profit and resource flows are unhindered.